Book Lover. Karen Mack
Am I disturbing you?”
“No, Mom. It’s okay,” I lie. “What’s up?”
“Well, the answer is ‘roast pig.’ It’s the subject of one of Charles Lamb’s most famous essays. Does it fit?”
For a moment I can’t figure out what she is talking about, but then I remember I was struggling with that crossword clue for two nights and finally couldn’t stand it anymore. I usually call Virginia when I feel like cheating because she used to do the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle in about an hour and then cheerfully tell me how easy it was. But lately, with Camille, she’s so frazzled it’s a waste. So I called my mom, who doesn’t have Virginia’s graduate degree in the classics, but is the most avid reader of your basic moldy classics that I know and sometimes has an answer.
“Gee, Mom, that’s great. I knew you’d get it, you’re …” The baby is now howling so loud in the background that I can’t hear myself talk. “I’ll call you later, okay?”
“You know, your sister doesn’t know how to deal with that child. When you kids were babies—”
“Mom, I gotta go, okay? I’ll call you later.”
Virginia places Camille in her Portacrib in my bedroom and shuts the door. I look at her in disbelief. “What are you doing?”
“Well, she hasn’t slept a wink today and she is so strung out that I can’t stand it. Dr. Friedman says I just have to bite the bullet and let her cry it out or she’ll never get on a schedule and Andy and I will be walking zombies for the rest of our lives.”
“Not that I’m an expert, but Dr. Friedman isn’t here listening to the screaming, and maybe if you just held her and rocked her she’d nod off. I can’t stand it when she wails.” We look at each other and rush into the bedroom.
It always ends like this when Virginia comes over. I give her my opinion, which then gives her permission to do what she wants, which is to comfort the baby. It all seems so simple. But then I’m not there at two in the morning. Virginia rocks Camille, who eventually conks out, and we immediately hit the white wine and cheese. It’s at this point that Virginia says something sweet about her husband, Andy, a Ph.D. in psychology and an expert on aging (how depressing), who treats his wife with undying respect (she’s the one with the trust fund). It’s one of those marriages where there’s only the two of them, and, of course, now Camille. She gave up her job teaching Latin at a preppy boarding school to move out here with him and they’ve been happily married most of my adult life, something that neither my mother nor I could ever achieve.
Sometimes when we’re sitting together like this, the baby asleep, the afternoon clouds closing in, I flash on our tumultuous lives as kids. Mother was always recovering from her two-martini cocktail hour, which started at three in the afternoon and ended several hours after dinner, which she often missed, and Father popped in and out of our lives in a series of long separations.
I still have dreams about him that give Ginny and me a good laugh. He’s been abducted by evil aliens like Meg’s father in A Wrinkle in Time, kidnapped by terrorists, taken against his will, forced to leave us, but unlike Odysseus, he never braved the Fates to come home.
Growing up, my father was intimidating and demanding, but those qualities were tempered by an irresistible charisma. At dinner parties, he dominated the conversation and charmed all the women—he was always the star. My mother tolerated his celestial aura but would frequently describe him by repeating Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s quote about her father, Teddy: “He wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.”
My father was all that my mother wasn’t—maybe that was the attraction. And he loved to have a good time. She disapproved of the circus, the zoo, amusement parks, and even Christmas. And he relished those things. So she’d stay home while we’d all climb in his Seville and come home hours later, the car trashed with cotton candy sticks, Cracker Jacks, shriveled balloons, and the remains of whatever fast food we’d eaten.
But these idyllic days were rare. When he lived with us, he was either at the office or traveling to some exotic land, chasing down the latest woven chenille or ornate Aubusson, which he produced on hundreds of looms around the world. The owner of a textile mill, he was a self-made tycoon—absent six days a week and asleep on the couch on the seventh, lulled by the constant drone of the Phillies games. His fortunes rose and fell with the price of goods, but he managed to leave us each a modest trust fund, which Virginia tells me, at the rate I’m going, I’ve got maybe five years of left.
In those days, dinner was usually something the housekeeper would put in the oven at three in the afternoon and we’d take out whenever my father came home from work. During the meal, he would cover up my mother’s absences with games of twenty questions and “What in the World?” My brilliant sister would always excel in the current events category. She gobbled up every newspaper she could get her hands on, and before I could stumble onto the answer, she’d grin and throw it out in a stage whisper. But when it came to literature, I was the master. One night, I remember him asking us to quote something from a classic family saga. He was expecting something from The Swiss Family Robinson or Little Women, but the first thing that popped into my head was Lady Bracknell’s response to hearing that Jack had lost both his parents. “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”* It was a competition of sorts, but we both basked in his sense of pride and his undivided attention.
Long after the dishes were cleared, Mother would come floating downstairs, giving me a lovely smile and rummaging through the shelves for a can of Campbell’s soup or kidney beans. There were periods, however, when she was glorious. She had a long, patrician nose and dark, wavy, lustrous hair swept back with diamond-studded tortoiseshell combs and hairpins. When we were in grade school she would announce her own schedule of holidays and we would take turns skipping school. We’d go downtown to the Philadelphia Museum of Art or to a concert with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra and then to the Crystal Tea Room at Wanamaker’s department store, where we’d get cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off and rice pudding. We were her little pets for the day, and she’d buy us ribbons, hair clips, or a new pair of shoes.
On weekends, we went to the library, where I’d roam around bored and restless while my mother would sink into a cubicle and hunker down for what seemed like hours. She was a masterful reader and, next to gin, it was the most important thing in her life. It was of paramount importance to her that I read too and often she’d say to me, “No matter what happens to you, Dora, you can always pick up a book,” in the way I imagined other mothers would comfort their daughters with words of endearment. Or at the very least, advise them to get off the couch and do something.
Incidentally, it’s no accident that my mother named me Dora. I don’t tell many people, but Dora is short for Eudora Welty, one of my mother’s idols. It all sounds so, well, bookish, but at the time, my mother identified with Welty’s voracious literary appetites and used to proudly tell me that she and Welty had the same literary background, from Chaucer and Virgil to Yeats, Matthew Arnold, and Virginia Woolf (guess who was named after her). I think she also admired Welty’s intensely private persona and secretly envied the fact that she was an independent, eccentric woman who gloried in books and her camellia garden and was quite content to live alone.
Some biographers claim that Welty’s mother was so obsessed with books that she once rushed into a burning house not to save the children, but to save a set of valuable Dickens volumes. I don’t think my mother would go to that extreme, but she certainly admired the single-mindedness of it all. Anyway, Welty was said to be genteel and straightforward and that’s the way my mother usually comes across.
After my father left for good, my mother stopped doing much of anything and the locked-bedroom-door incidents grew longer. We were never quite sure if she was reading, recovering, sleeping, or drinking. During this period, Virginia became the caretaker: shopping, cooking, tidying up; while I mimicked my mother’s retreat